Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Le Vite Degli Altri

"The Lives of Others" ("Das Leben Der Anderen" - Germany 2006), the debut work of young German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (1973), represents one of the most interesting novelties of this cinema season. The reasons lie not so much in the fact that the work was recently awarded as the best foreign film at the Hollywood Oscar ceremony, but in the themes around which the narrated story revolves and secondly in the structural quality of the narrative under different formal aspects.

Set in East Berlin towards the mid-'80s, the film is indeed a portrait of a historical era, as it paints Communist Germany a few years before the fall of the wall, when glasnost was not yet on the horizon. In the images of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, we rediscover a gloomy Berlin even during the day, experiencing the memory of an anonymous, colorless city. An environment that conveys a desire to escape and the typical fatigue of an era's near end, albeit unconsciously at the time. The city, therefore, with its streets, regime architecture, and its grayness, is one of the protagonists of the film, which assumes almost documentary-like tones, strengthened by the perfect reconstruction devoted to the interiors of homes and offices, always leaving a sense of poorly endured homogenization by their inhabitants.
The film also represents a sort of German self-awareness aimed at coming to terms with this recent pre-reunification past. To this end, the director's gaze brings the DDR to life with all the typical ailments of an oppressive and authoritarian form of government like the Communist one, foremost among them being the pervasive governmental control. In the film, German citizens are subjected to an Orwellian surveillance by the Stasi secret services, consistently aimed at identifying the party's enemies. Bugs, wiretapping, blackmail, and threats are the tools of the Stasi, perceived by the populace as an additional cancer of the regime.

This historical and environmental context is the frame from which the story takes its course, with a diligent Stasi officer named Gerd Wiesler (codename HGW XX/7) as its protagonist, splendidly portrayed by Ulrich Mühe. Wiesler is an uncompromising bureaucrat specialized in interrogations. Cold, determined, organized, rational, scientific, he is a typical "product" of Communist bureaucracy. He leads a dull life, divided between contacts with his superiors, who are eager to climb the party cursus honorum, and hours spent in a standard and ordinary apartment. This life - or non-life depending on one's perspective - is overturned and transformed by his encounter with other lives, which he finds himself monitoring within the scope of his duties. Encountering these lives, discovering through them music, poetry, and theater, becomes a lever that slowly unlocks his heart, leading him to actions previously unthinkable for him. This personal transformation of Wiesler thus becomes the glue and raison d'être of the story, in which other protagonists sometimes present an almost Shakespearean profile. Not so much for the ardor of feelings but for the density of situations intertwined with each other. A plot where political power becomes an instrumentum to achieve private ends, where intrigue is everyday life, and the twist finds ample space without falling into banal effect. And above all emerges an intense humanity that overwhelms Wiesler, making him a spectator capable of influencing from the shadows the most classic of emotional entanglements - him, her, the other - set in the historical-political backdrop of the described era.

Together with the director's choices and the structure of the plot, the picture is completed by convincing acting and dialogues, able to fully engage the viewer from the beginning to the end of the film. If you haven't done it yet, go see it.